Slaughterhouse Seventy Five
by quothme
Summary: Peeta had begged her to kill him. Perhaps she should have listened. A visceral reaction to Mockingjay. Title repurposed from Vonnegut.
1. Chapter 1

**slaughterhouse (seventy) five**

Ø

a hunger games fic

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><p><strong>Summary:<strong> "You should have listened, you know. When he begged you to kill him." A visceral reaction to _Mockingjay_. Title repurposed from Vonnegut. Dark, possible triggers. Starts after Gale asks, "So, now that we're dead, what's our next move?"

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><p><strong>Chapter 1<strong>

"Our next move," Peeta says, "is to kill me."

His words are hummingbirds—they thrum, they mesmerize, they shock us silent. The type of silent you are when you know something horrible to be true. Those who remain of Squad 451, Jackson and Finnick and even the Leegs, they look this way or that way or any other way that is not at _him_. Or at me.

And it's true. We should kill this puppet who wears Peeta's face. This person who threw Mitchell into that pod, the person with bleached mad eyes intent on crushing my skull—this stranger sitting broken and almost tearful in front of us now—this isn't Peeta. For all I know, Peeta—the real Peeta—is already dead.

Maybe I was right earlier. Maybe he really is a mutt.

_Kill Peeta_, Bogs had said.

_Do you want me to kill him?_ Gale had asked.

_Kill me_, Peeta confirmed. Now, his blue eyes spear into mine, no longer the shy flit-and-away from when we were young and sitting in school, worlds apart.

I wonder: Is it really murder, if a person begs to die? Or is it humane, like putting down a lame animal? I think of wolves with human eyes, Rue's eyes. And now Peeta, a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Gale shifts, the first of us to move. Of course. His private offer to me hadn't been a bluff.

"He's right." His voice rings out into the silence, authoritative, rational, changing wavering to decisive. No one will meet Peeta's gaze; they're all looking at Gale. Gale, as he stands there so tall and firm and almost-wise. Gale, who raises his sidearm and points it straight between Peeta's eyes. A quick, clean kill. Leave nothing for the Capitol to recycle.

I've seen him do this a hundred times.

But before a single beat of my heart, before I even register the motion, my bow is up, arrow notched. The creak of the string as I draw back divides the silence.

At the sound, this familiar sound, Gale's eyes shift to me, jaw slack. In disbelief, because I've never pointed a weapon at him, not so much as a blunt butter knife. Back in the forest, he teased me for being so adamant that we keep our arrow tips and our knife edges pointed in innocuous directions.

"Afraid you'll trip, little girl?" he'd say, and I'd always scowl and retort that he'd best tend to his own boat feet. I wasn't afraid of tripping, of letting an arrow fly unfettered. It is merely something my father taught me: Don't aim at those you don't plan to kill.

Don't aim at those you love.

So Gale can't believe my aim. Yet in a single glance at my face, my stance, he knows. He knows I'm serious. I won't shoot to kill, but I _will_ shoot.

Just as assuredly as he will shoot Peeta.

I don't even have to speak, to command him to lower his weapon. This is how well he knows me, how well we communicate even in silence. Together, we lower our weapons.

Words erupt around us, flowing into the stillness—disbelief, agreement of Gale's intent, some in our party wanting to turn back, others adamant that we should complete the (_fictional_) mission.

Gale and I, we just stare at each other over the melee. How easy it was for him to raise his weapon to Peeta. How easy it was for me to raise my own. Peeta is also silent, framed by a couch the electric color of his eyes. Although I'm pulled by the gravity of his gaze, I can't look at him. I can't see what's likely in his face: disappointment, anger, contempt. Certainly no emotion I expect.

Gale looks away first.

Talk dies as I shift minutely to speak. Heads turn toward me, faces open. Trusting. Believing that I can somehow make the tough decisions and deliver them from the mouth of Hell. Even though I can't choose between a hunter and a baker.

"No one kills Peeta," I say. "I need him." Gale's face darkens further, ears pink, and I add, "For the mission. He may remember something about the mansion layout that will help."

No one questions my logic.

Not out loud.

Ø

When I move, they follow. Even Peeta.

Ø

Later, when we're alone in the bowels of night, Peeta asks, "Would he have shot me?"

I think of Gale's face when one of his snares is effective. I think of Gale braving the whipping post, for me.

"Yes."

Peeta ponders this for a long moment as a train rumbles through the nearby Transfer. Then, "Would you have shot him?"

And I don't even have to think. "Yes."

In shadow, Peeta's face is foreign, alien. He says nothing, no doubt unable to reconcile the images of the girl in his brain with someone who would save his life.

I want to reach out, feel that he's real.

I don't.

Ø

We've descended into a grave. Around me, people die. What remains of our squad (whose number is the temperature at which books burn) is culled from few to fewer still by the mutts who know my name. I watch skin drip like wax down a burning candle. I watch Finnick snuffed out, just like _that_. No final grand gesture, no sacrificing himself to save others, no gasp to tell Annie how much he loves her. Just gone.

It could have been Gale. It could have been Peeta.

There's a moment when it still could be. They're both down there, the two of them, and one or both might not come up. Peeta is climbing with his hands cuffed. Gale might take this opportunity. One flick of his wrist, and Peeta could lose his footing. Or it could be an accident. I'd never know.

But then his head pops through the porthole and it's Gale, following close behind, who's clutching his neck, Gale whose uniform is shredded.

Still, I kiss Peeta to bring him back. He bites my lip hard enough to draw blood.

Kisses are their own type of weapon.

Ø

When it's dark, Buttercup incarnate watches over our sleep. Guarding us from the night.

Ø

Citizens of the Capitol trudge by on their bizarre, hodgepodge pilgrimage to their perceived Mecca, as though someone at the City Center will save them. How easily propaganda has swayed them, how effectively luxury has numbed them, that they drift like sheep.

When we hear on the monitor that Snow is opening the mansion to refugees, I know that this is our chance. Somehow, we have to be one of them. We have to be invited in to his lair.

"I won't go with you," Peeta agrees. But that's because he wants to hang back, create a diversion. I'm shaking my head, fiercely, because I think I know exactly what he considers a diversion.

He'll wait a few minutes until we're out of sight (give us a nice _one-one-thousand, two_). Then he'll shed his wig and costume, stand calmly in a stream of humanity, hold his head high, and wait. He'll _be_ the diversion.

This time, the crowd won't make a mistake.

I can't protect him if I'm not there. But I can't protect myself if he's with me.

"No," I say. "You stay here. If I have to, I'll chain you up."

Lips white with pain, Gale _looks_ at me. Behind his eyes are accusations he won't voice. Contrary to my stated reason for keeping Peeta alive, I don't want him anywhere near that mansion. I want him in the back room of a shop that sells fur underwear, handcuffed to a stairwell support. Where he'll be safe.

But then Peeta says the only thing that could make me change my mind.

"Please," he says. "Don't leave me behind."

Not again.

Ø

In this final arena, Tigris performs a final miracle, remaking us into sheep. In pairs, we join the herd. All but Peeta, who sets out against the tide. I can't even look back on him, one last time. I hadn't said goodbye.

Ø

Chaos ensues. We're separated from Cressida and Pollux. Pods shoot and boil and liquefy. Blood makes rivulets in the snow. The ground opens between Gale and me, a physical manifestation of our psychological rift. When I see him get captured, I don't even kill him.

"Go!" he says, thinking ever of me. But he's also alerted his captors that he's not alone. A Peacekeeper leans out the apartment window, searching. Before we can make eye contact, before he can see me watching Gale a final time, I duck my head down, shuffing my hood up. It's instinct, to blend casual like this, all those years I sauntered past Peacekeepers, pack laden with contraband.

Somehow, it works; I don't get shot in the back. As I slink into an alley, I feel it—I'm on my own. I'm _me_, singular, as I approach the hordes of civilians and soldiers who separate me from my final prey. And past these scurrying ants, the anthill itself, a fortress of impenetrable stone.

My mission is a farce, doomed from the beginning. Squad 451 perished for nothing. We were supposed to be for show.

I'm standing in a puddle of ice, urging myself to _think think think._ This isn't a game, where a Game Master might intervene now lest the audience get bored. What can I do that will make one iota of difference in this mayhem? Find the nearest Peacekeeper and drop my hood? Walk up to the main mansion entrance and knock?

To start, I move. Walk toward the bullseye of the City Circle. Try to act ditsy, like a wilting flower, which isn't difficult given my watery limbs. Through the gap in my hood, the mansion walls seem to grow impossibly tall.

The square is filled with lambs penned by a barricade. The crisp air has slapped their cheeks pink, and they huddle for warmth. What kind of parents would allow their children to serve as a human shield? But I already know. Parents like mine. Parents who have no choice. Or who no longer exist. Perhaps the square is filled with orphans.

I stand at the far edge of the concrete barrier—a mere four feet tall, but it might as well be a hundred. I'm no longer a child; they won't let me in. But I'm close enough now that, if I reveal who I am, I might be taken to Snow. There are two Peacekeepers several meters away, barking on their radios but otherwise doing nothing to help their fellow citizens. I can tell them I have an important message from Coin. President's ears only.

I take a step toward them.

Impossibly, some unknown Game Master intervenes after all. A firebomb detonates close, almost too close, and I'm thrown to the ground.

The Rebels have arrived.

For a moment, I can't breathe, can't see, can't hear. But as my vision clears, I focus on a miracle, a gaping window (a gleeful maw) on the second story where there hadn't been one before. Chunks of concrete cascade down, providing a tenuous ladder.

Right where the two Peacekeepers had been standing.

I scrabble over the rubble, too loud, too exposed. But there's no one over here because they're all over _there_, diverted to where the Rebels are swarming like tracker jackers. My hands singe against heated rock, but I press on because I have to, hauling myself up onto a ledge. With a single nudge, the slab that had been my boost tumbles away.

No one can follow my path.

Ø

I've stepped into an alternate reality, a world inexplicably untouched by the mayhem mere meters away. The Capitol has always been like this, opulence hiding oppression.

Quickly, I shed my Capitol trappings, stuffing my furry cloak behind a low couch. Bow in hand, I begin to hunt.

No one stops me as I stride down a corridor lined with jarring colors and shapes that pass here for art. No one stops me as I kick open door after door, all ajar, all leading into vacant rooms. (Vacant, even as children freeze outside.) In one, I pause, because I've been here before. In another lifetime. The room is stripped bare now, all indications of my presence erased.

I jog on, and the carpet beneath my boots thickens, becoming impossibly more lush. I travel for so long, my arms ache with the effort of keeping my bow semi-taut. Too long, given what's happening in another time, another place. Occasionally, I freeze and flatten at the distant tramp of boots, likely contingents of Peacekeepers. Somehow, they're always headed away. Reinforcements for the square, perhaps. Or perhaps an indication that I'm tracking in the wrong direction. Maybe I should follow them, see if they'll take me to their leader.

I'm about to turn around, backtrack in the direction of all the activity, when I smell it—a curdling waft of something familiar. Something from my past. Something not entirely pleasant but that hints entirely of Snow. For the first time, I falter. It's not a scent I'd willingly follow, but follow I must.

The smell blooms as I approach a door set into a wall of frosted glass. The door opens soundlessly, like everything else in this place.

I step into a nightmare. Inside, the stench of decay is so stifling, I can't catch my breath to scream.

They're _everywhere_.

Roses.

Crawling trellises to the ceiling, choking out a meager skylight. Dangling from arches like swollen spiders. No matter where I turn, they're there, reaching tendrils out to grab, to snag. I cringe away, not wanting them to touch me, not wanting to brush even a single leaf. But even as I retreat from some, others snag in my hair, my bow. Pressing on, I'm terrified, nearly succumbing to the smell, to the fear of what could be lurking around each bush.

Then, a chilling sound, one that I've heard before.

_Katnissssss._

Blindly, I crouch, listening for scrabbling claws on the flagstones lining my path, waiting for a fresh batch of slithering lizards, me protected this time by nothing but flimsy flora. But there is no pursuit, no movement. Just expectant, sinister silence.

The sound starts again—_Katnissssss_, it says, _Katnissssss_—and my skin prickles as I finally perceive where it's coming from. It's coming from everywhere, from all around me. It's coming from the roses.

As I watch in horror, nearby buds unfurl, swiveling like cameras, fixing an unblinking gaze on my position. _Katnissssss_, they say, and _Katnissssss_, others agree, a swelling chorus that gets picked up by waves upon waves of blooms. There must be thousands of them. And they know exactly who I am.

I think: So this is how I die. Not surrounded by my friends and allies, not underground, but alone, in a swarm of roses. I wait, expecting the roses to snake out and tangle me up. It would be just like Snow to engineer the heart of this place as a final level of defense. Brutality disguised with beauty.

But the roses don't move. They just stare and stare and stare.

_Come, Katnisssssss_, they sigh.

And I think I finally understand. This time, the voice is not a threat to be eluded. It is a siren to be followed. They _want_ me to follow it. To sure death.

Ahead, leaves rustle, but no wind stirs the air. There, through an opening in the foliage, I see a door on the opposite wall swing shut. There, then, is where I should be, the only door that has closed to me.

I steel myself: I'm here, I'm ready, I'm going to kill Snow. Here, in the depths of the snake's lair, surrounded by his minions and his terrors and his roses, it does not matter. Somehow, I'll kill him.

I'll burn, but he'll burn with me.

Fire behind my eyes, I yank open the door and swivel my bow into a yawing opening. Nothing stirs. Not even a flesh-eating mouse. The air seems to _breathe_.

But the moment I charge into the gloom, the Peacekeepers descend, like vultures to carrion. They wear gloves, but these gloves are not white. They're red like blood, like roses. The President's personal guard, then.

He's close.

Blood-dipped hands strip me of my weapon, frisk me for others. The hands aren't gentle. They're rough and thorough and aware that I'm a something-year-old girl. But then the hands retreat. They close the door behind me, and I'm abruptly alone and defenseless, a Mockingjay in a cage.

It's over in less than a minute.

I inspect my prison. An entire wall is nothing but a screen spitting static, breaking at the grumble of a far-off explosion. Maybe a control room of some sort, likely where the President records his broadcasts.

I sit, trying just to breathe.

He knows I'm here.

He knows _why_ I'm here.

He has anticipation down to an art.

Finally, finally, finally, the other door across the room opens, slow and regal, the type of grand entrance that Snow favors. A man steps forward. Pale hair, pale eyes, pale skin. But the paleness is wrong. Too slight. Too tall.

Not Snow, then.

The monitor shimmers, illuminating the figure.

It's Peeta.

Peeta, who hadn't turned back to the safe house after all. Peeta, who is somehow here, back in the stronghold of Snow's mansion. Peeta stands in front of me now.

Where I am, so shall Peeta be.

Except.

This is not _my_ Peeta.

I know from the way he saunters into the room, from the frost coating his eyes, from how his familiar face twists into something unfamiliar. This is a perversion of Peeta. Light dances, and I see it, all over his face. The garish makeup Tigris had applied is smeared, askew.

"Katniss," he says, and even his voice is different, the sibilant hiss of a mutt. His eyes are black holes, devouring everything in their path. We stand, frozen to our opposite walls, nothing between us but a low table and two chairs.

The snow on the monitor resolves into President Snow, making his grand entrance at last. Even now, when his life is forfeit. His visage is so large that his plump limps could swallow me whole.

As his face crystallizes, so does my understanding. He's not running. And if he's not running, it's because he can't. He knows he's drowning—and he'll take others with him.

"Coward," I spit.

His lips stretch in a cadaver's smile. "Perhaps. But it's the cowards who live. I'm the ultimate survivor. It's one of many things you and I have in common."

The thought of any part of me being like any part of him is nauseating. The glow of the screen, the lingering stench of roses, Peeta's eyes in the face of a mutt…my stomach swims.

"You should have listened to him, you know." He flutters a hand toward Peeta. His gesture, his tone are so cavalier, so incongruously confident.

There's something wrong.

"What?"

"When he begged you to kill him."

Something very wrong, indeed. Horror fists my gut as I realize what his words imply. Snow knows that Peeta begged me to kill him. The Capitol is always watching. Snow's watching me now, watching the horror spread to my face, watching it glaze my eyes.

"Yes," he says. "You didn't think you made it here on your own, did you? Past the thousands of cameras in the Mansion alone? Past the hundreds of dots that weren't on your precious Holo? Which, by the way, was based on intel I _allowed_ the Rebels to steal."

I think about how, one by one, the members of our squad were Reaped. Slowly, purposefully.

Snow's watching me carefully. "Yes, now you see. Even Peeta abandoned you in the end. He was kind enough to offer himself as a distraction. Only, not for _you_."

_Kill me_, Peeta had begged. Consciously or not, he'd known.

"He won't hurt me," I say.

"Oh, I think he will." Snow regards me dispassionately. "I had hoped, of course, that he'd get lucky and kill you back in District 13. The element of surprise and all. But we both know better. He's weak. He's always been weak."

"You're wrong," I deny, instantly. "He's not weak, he's…" But I don't know what he is. Soft yet strong. Cunning yet kind. A contradiction in every way.

Snow expels a laugh. "He's in love with you. It makes him weak."

Peeta's love for me has cost him so much. Maybe too much.

"Or, I should say," Snow continues, "he _was_ in love with you. We've fixed that. His initial field test wasn't successful, so I had the doctors make some final adjustments."

I can't stop the strangle at the thought of Peeta being given more venom, more terror, more lies.

Snow cocks his head, curious. "I thought I'd be doing you a favor. Having someone professing their undying love to you when you don't return their feelings—it's tiresome, no? I've had my share of sycophants."

Peeta sneers at me, oblivious to words, to Snow, to anything but hate. His body strains forward and shakes like a beast on a chain. I see no restraints; although still encircling his bloodied wrists, his handcuffs range free, the chain joining them slit.

Still, he does not take a step toward me.

Maybe he's fighting his own mind.

Maybe, just maybe, he's remembered that he loves me.

But I think it more likely that Snow's dominion over him is total. One word, and Peeta will be on me like a rabid dog. This is why you put them down. While you still have a chance, before they can rip out your heart. My fingers clench around a phantom bow.

"What are you waiting for?" I whisper to Snow, Peeta, both.

"Nothing. Now that you're here and Peeta's here, we can begin."

On cue, lights illuminate the table between us. There, spotlighted in the center of gleaming marble, is a hand gun. For the first time, Peeta's eyes leave my face. They fixate on that gun, a few paces from him. A few paces from me.

A final Cornucopia.

He goes still, awaiting command.

"What is this?" I ask, but I already know.

"A game, my dear. A final game. Because I need only one of you. Doesn't matter which one. My life, in return for yours." He raises a hand, runs a finger down the camera lens. As though it's my throat. "Of course, I'd prefer that it be you."

Finally, I understand why he isn't running. Why a hovercraft hadn't already whisked him away to some idyllic hideout in far-off hills, where he could retire in luxury.

He needs _leverage_.

He knew that we'd come to him.

He'd _planned_ on it.

We're everlasting pawns in his game.

Snow whispers, "Who's it going to be, Mockingjay? Prove to me, once and for all, that you don't love him. Or die."

A few more minutes, and the Rebels might find us. A few more minutes and a shell could take out this entire wing. A few more minutes, and this war might be over.

We don't have a few more minutes.

"Burn," Snow whispers.

At the word, Peeta lurches forward, a zombie.

I've always been faster than Peeta, quick. He's solid, heavy, built for endurance and strength; I'm a lightweight sprinter. In short distances, hand-to-hand combat, I've always had the advantage.

I would have gotten to the gun first.

Except, I don't move.

I can't.

Every survival instinct I've had, all my years of training, the time I spent in the arena—everything in me tells me to propel myself forward, scrabble for that deadly weapon, and use it to remove the threat to my life. I don't even have to kill him. Shoot him in the leg, the arm, whatever it takes to get him on the ground, incapacitated but still breathing.

I can't move.

I can't move because I know that running toward the Cornucopia is always a bloodbath. I'm good with bows and arrows, not handguns. In the heat of the moment, things happen, fists grapple, and guns go off in inconvenient places like faces and guts.

But mostly, I can't move because right before Snow gave the order, Peeta made a movement of his own—a shake of his head. Slight, so slight, like a nervous, psychotic twitch, but it was there. Perhaps a muscle spasm due to the mind-altering drugs in his system. Or perhaps something else.

So I stand, my back pressed against a smooth wall, and I trust.

I refuse to play this game.

Peeta roars as he reaches the gun, breathing labored as he points it straight at me. The tip of the weapon wavers, but not so much that he'd miss.

President Snow's expression is surprise, pleasure, gloating. "I don't believe it. Maybe you do love him after all."

I don't know. Love, it's not something I understand. But I do know that I will do whatever it takes to save his life. Even at the cost of my own.

"I won't kill him," I say.

"Too bad he doesn't feel the same," Snow says, eyes agleam with the mania of a cornered animal. "After all, how could he?"

And that's when the President gives me a front-row seat to the new memories they've grafted into Peeta's brain. Narrated in the same false cheer I've heard umpteen times in the yearly propo video for the games. (War, terrible war.) How I was directly responsible for the genocide in my own—in Peeta's—district. How I laughed when I personally inspected the results. How I sang about the Hanging Tree and smiled.

Despite how Snow is twisting things, he's not entirely wrong—each narrative has a glimmer of real. Indirectly and directly, I've made Peeta suffer. Peeta and so many others.

The most effective lies are based on truth.

At any moment, a bullet will punctuate the litany of my sins. But as seconds of silence draw on, the light drains from Snow's slit eyes as they look rapidly between Peeta, me.

"Burn," he repeats.

Peeta's trigger finger twitches, but subsides.

"Burn!" Snow demands again.

No response.

Then he's shouting it, screeching it, spittle-blood spraying the screen.

But Peeta doesn't move.

He doesn't move because, in his eyes, I see that he's waiting. For me, like he always has. Like the three days he lay in a cesspool of mud, injured and unmoving, waiting for me to save him. But this time, I can't save him. I can't heal him. I'm on the wrong end of a gun. And he's too broken.

In his eyes, I see that he knows this.

Yet still, he waits.

Disbelieving, Snow says, "This is the girl who pretended to love you."

Peeta waits.

"She abandoned you to be tortured!"

Peeta waits.

"Burn, burn, burn, BURN."

At each word, Peeta staggers like he's taken bullets to the chest. We have an audience of one, yet still I remain stoic, showing no weakness.

Yet still, he waits.

"Fine." Snow is deadly quiet. "If you won't kill her, I will." He shifts off-camera, reaching for some switch.

Peeta waits no longer. He reacts. Instantly. Vehemently. Lethally. A flick of his wrist, the crack of a gunshot, and Snow's face winks out, the light in the room fizzling to gloom. We stare together at a web of glass expanding from a small hole in the monitor. Right between where his snake eyes had been.

Game over.

I launch myself off the wall.

"We have to go. Now!" I say, reaching for the gun. We have only seconds until Snow's Peacekeepers flood the room, or tracker jackers, or black slime, or mutts, or until Snow himself comes to finish what he's started, this final game.

But Peeta doesn't hand me the gun. He doesn't rush forward to join me at the exit to the maze of blood roses.

Instead, he takes a step back.

Points the gun at his own temple.

And fires.


	2. Chapter 2

It's the little things.

For my father, it was a match.

It's always a match, down there. You try spending fourteen hours a day bent half over in the dark and muck. Try it and see if you aren't jonesing for a hit of those joysticks that are Strictly Prohibited but that somehow still slip onto each of the silver snake trains, just like the white liquor that masquerades as water but burns like fire.

One little joystick.

That's what your friends had said, too. One little taste, they dared, dangling an innocuous, skinny tube between bared teeth and lips. Like the straws they use in the Capitol to preserve their neon white teeth. And you looked over to see that one person, that girl or guy with the little dimple or the little mole right there. Little things.

So it's just this once, you agreed, reaching and smiling and belonging. But what you didn't know is that once quickly becomes twice and then thrice and then you're sucking on that innocuous little straw like it's the only air you can breathe. And then you're that punk down in the mines, stepping off into a side tunnel for just one little taste. Won't hurt nobody. Until, of course, it does.

For my father, it was a match.

For Panem, it was a few poison-plump berries in two palms. It was three fingers. It was a single slip of paper naming a slip of a girl.

For Peeta, it's a bit of steel no wider than his thumb.

Ø

There's a reason the Game Masters no longer give tributes guns. Too quick, too easy, like falling asleep.

A twitch of a finger, and my world explodes. Literally, as the instant Peeta pulls the trigger, the same moment Peeta blows his brains out, something else blows the nearby wall in.

Everything goes sideways, and I land on palms and knees. My mouth is open in sound (I can't hear), head ringing, reaching for a Peeta that is no more (I can't find him). The floor tilts, shaking me from my precarious perch to the ground. Rubble grinds into my cheek. Above, the ceiling creaks and flakes.

This was caused by so much more than a bullet. Someone, somewhere has directed a firebomb our way. Another finger, on another trigger. Perhaps Snow, as he'd reached for some unseen control panel. Perhaps one of the Rebel ships, seeking to chop off the head of the snake. The air around me screams and sizzles, frustrated in this lifeless place to find nothing to burn.

Then, as suddenly as it all began, it stops. For a moment, all is silent, all is calm. I lay and I just breathe. Breathe and breathe and wait for the sky to fall. Peeta's dead and I with him. My eyes begin to drift shut.

In the dark of death, something moves. A mere shift of rubble, but I know, I just know that it's some new horror that's been unearthed. I'm thinking it's Snow, come to finish me off at last, sifting through the ashes of his empire. Or perhaps a mutt with eyes like an electric sky. Or maybe Peeta himself, rising from the dead, a final mission branded into his brain—kill Katniss.

Slowly, very slowly, I raise my head to the sound. It's dark now, almost too dark, but in the meager light cast from a gaping wound in the ceiling, I watch a figure rise from behind a nearby mound of concrete.

And there's a sound, a click click click like claws on marble.

My fingers clench around a nearby rock.

Again the sound, but the figure doesn't move, doesn't come closer. It just sits, hunched, head bowed.

Click, click, click.

That sound, it's almost metallic.

At the thought, I propel myself upward into a crouch, whirling so I'm facing the person head on, grimly ready for whatever is next. Despite my movement, the figure still doesn't move, doesn't acknowledge my presence. The person seems to be mesmerized by something in their hand. Something that glints like a gun.

Click, click, click, goes the gun.

And I see this and I hear this but I can't understand this because…

Peeta is dead.

"No," the person moans, as if in answer, and the gun goes click, click, click. The person sounds remarkably like Peeta. But it can't be because Peeta can't speak. Peeta can't move. Peeta is lying somewhere in a bed of blood.

I can't understand and I can't understand and then…

Then I do.

It click click clicks.

Our Game Master gave us only one bullet. One bullet that Peeta used earlier to shut off Snow.

I scrabble up, slipping on detritus in a mad dash for Peeta. Peeta's alive. Peeta's alive and is moving and is still trying to kill himself with the gun he's holding in his hand.

Click click click.

"We have to go," I say, clutching Peeta's arm, wrenching the foul instrument from his grasp. He lets me but then recoils, cowering beneath the nearby table, latching himself to one of its legs, handcuffs clinking as though they can somehow restrain him still.

"No." He shakes his head, thick and slow. I pull on his arm, but I'm not strong enough to move him. Above us, the ceiling groans. We have only seconds.

"Peeta!" I scream, gripping his cheeks in my hands, willing his vacant eyes to focus on my face. Instead, they focus on something else, something lower. I follow his gaze to see him reach a trembling hand for the curl of my braid, polishing it between his fingers.

"Shiny," he says. I can't see Peeta anywhere in his eyes.

Above us, the ceiling gives a final sigh and relinquishes its load. Peeta's hand clutches at my braid and he yanks. So hard that my head snaps and I see stars.

Before everything goes dark, I think, This is how my father died.

Ø

When I wake from the dead, I'm swathed in sheets that slink. There's sweet on the air, as of something puffy and pink. I'm still in the Capitol, then. Or perhaps hell.

My first thought is of Peeta.

"He's here." It's mother, rising from a chair. I must have spoken his name. She steps closer but doesn't touch me, expression wary. "In the infirmary."

"Can I see him?"

Mother falters at that.

"Not yet," Prim chirps, bouncing herself onto the foot of the bed.

They fill me in. In a remarkably accurate impression of Effie, Prim informs me that the odds were in our favor (the last time I ever want to hear about odds). That the table, that marble monolith of a table, protected Peeta and me from a bulk of the falling sky, courtesy of a Rebel firebomb. My scalp is still delicate where Peeta yanked on my hair, forcing me to join him under the table. Saving me still.

Rebel soldiers searching for Snow recognized us, dug us from the ruins of the Capitol. I have a concussion, some bruises and scrapes from falling permacrete, but the table protected our vital organs from the worst of it.

But the most vital organ of all—Peeta's brain.

They don't have to tell me about that one. I already know. Peeta is worse off than I am because the last-minute "tweaking" the so-called doctors did further scrambled the eggs he has for brains. So they're still working with him, trying to coax him back to himself. Like taming a wild animal.

It may take months. It may take years.

It may not work at all.

Ø

We watch Snow's trial from the monitor in my room. Fitting.

It's short. There are no witnesses for, too many against. The appointed defense attorney presents the shortest, most vague rebuttal in history. Uses a lot of big words I don't follow, which is probably the point—say a lot without saying anything.

Representatives from each district vote, quick and unanimous. Snow is guilty of too many crimes to name. The penalty for his guilt is death by firing squad.

Namely, me.

I kill Snow, I'd told Coin, and she remembered.

Ø

Two days pass, and then I'm standing on this platform, and people from thirteen (minus one) districts are silent, waiting for me to perform this honor, wishing that they stood in my place, that their hands held my bow. They've produced it for me, how kind of them, how symbolic. Normally, my bow feels like an extension of my arm. Today it feels foreign, like a prosthetic limb that's an inch too long.

I'm standing a few paces from Snow, so close that it will be easy. Closer than Cato had been. As close as Marvel was from Rue.

Snow doesn't even look at me. He doesn't look at them. He stares off into the nearby woods, serene, as though enjoying the twilight of another day. Maybe if he'd look at me, it would be easier. Maybe if Prim weren't looking. She and the other children lining the crowd, up front where they can see. I think about the Mockingjay and how it's supposed to be a symbol of freedom, of life. Not death.

I draw the string back, so far back. Hold it for so long that my arm begins to tremble.

The crowd holds its breath.

Then I lower the bow, the notched arrow slipping to the floor.

The crowd begins to murmur. I make no move to retrieve the arrow, arms hanging loosely by my side.

"Something wrong?" a nearby soldier whispers, breaking protocol. He knows who I am. I don't know any of them.

I drop the bow as well, and it clatters twice before growing still.

No big speech, no rousing words condemning this last, heinous act.

I just…walk away.

Ø

No one stops me.

I step off the platform, away from the crowd. Soldiers edge aside to let me pass, three fingers making the sign of respect. They understand what it's like to kill.

Only one thought penetrates my haze: find Haymitch. And find him I do, not far from the banquet table. Of course there's a banquet table; it's a Capitol execution, what an occasion. He's sauced, but I've seen worse.

I plant myself in front of him. "Take us home."

He doesn't tease me. Doesn't ask questions I can't answer. Instead, he grabs a final flute of something that sloshes and grants my wish. He can't stomach the Capitol any more than I.

Later, I learn that President Coin stabbed Snow herself, right through the withering rose over his heart. The crowd did not cheer. Many of them were still looking after me, wondering whence their Mockingjay had flown.


	3. Chapter 3

Prim makes the journey with us, and I pretend.

As we enter my Victor's quarters, one of the few structures still standing in District 12, I pretend that she and I can play house. I pretend that we can share a bed like we used to. And we do, that night and many others, but it's not the same. I know, in my heart, that she can't stay.

One of us needs to take care of Mother, but Mother will not be coming back to this place. She needs to be in District 4, with its sunshine and its warm air off the sea. Where they have hospitals, real hospitals. And so does Prim. There's so much for her to learn there, my little healer. As much as I want to keep her all to myself, as much as I want her to heal me, I can't. She needs to be among the living. She can't stay here, can't dance on this grave.

For now, I indulge myself. I hover, watching her move about our house, and she's the 14-year-old I should have been. Bright smile, bright future. We watch Buttercup, who is apparently as impossible to kill now as when he was a kitten, chase that flashlight.

Prim asks gently if I'm going to hunt, but I just shake my head. I can't bear the thought of touching a bow. Not yet. But I do coax her out with me to the forest, although she hesitates initially at the sight of the fence, portions of it still separating us from freedom. We picnic by the lake (her eyes wide at so much water), and I try to teach her how to swim. She shrieks and sputters that it's "So cold!" By the time we leave, she can at least float in shallow water on her back.

"I can see those toes touching," I tease, knowing that she's cheating. I'd done the same to Father when I was first learning.

She just sticks her tongue out at me and basks golden in the sun.

Ø

When we make our way home, weary and sun-kissed, we find Buttercup guarding our weekly shipment of supplies and mail, his tail twitching against the porch.

"I've got the cold stuff," I call to Prim, hefting the larger packages down to our freezer in the cellar. When I'm done preserving the new food, the kitchen is still empty. Prim hasn't yet left the porch. I find her sitting next to Buttercup, leaning over a letter in her hand. From over her shoulder, I recognize Mother's barely literate scrawl.

She begins to read out loud. The message is innocuous, mostly comments about the glorious weather in 4. But the note ends with, You'd really like it here. Cold spreads to my extremities. It's Mother's meek way of making a request. Even though she has no right. Not after Father.

Prim folds up the letter, tucks it neatly back in the envelope.

For a moment, we're quiet.

Then I go straight to the point. "You'll really like 4."

Finnik was from 4.

I think Prim's going to say something, anything. Maybe tell me that she doesn't have to go to 4, that she can stay with me instead. But she doesn't say that. She knows better. She just nods once and goes inside. It doesn't take her long to pack her things.

"You can come, too," she says as she deposits her bag (woefully small) at the foot of the stairs. I'm waiting, ready to take her to the station. The return train leaves in half an hour. I'm wearing pretty much everything I own.

Instead, I say, "You'll be great. Both of you." And they will be.

We walk to the train slowly, a far cry from our mood coming back from the lake. The air smells of ash.

"Take care of Buttercup," Prim whispers as she hugs my neck, a catch in her throat. We both know she's not just talking about that blasted cat.

A silver snake of a train swallows my sister whole.

Ø

Now me, I sit. I don't go to the forest or the lake or the town. I don't hunt. I just wait. Maybe to die, maybe to live, I'm not really sure.

Ø

From the moment I see his dark hair through the door screen, I think I might have been waiting for this.

My mind takes me to a promise of endless days between the trees, by the lake, him getting to experiment with a slew of new snares, me perfecting the aerodynamics of my arrows.

I throw open my front door and throw myself into Gale's arms. For a moment, we grip tightly, just breathing each other in. It's natural, the way we fit. Then he sets me down, and I take a better look. He looks different. And there's something in his face.

I ask, "Is Hazelle okay?"

"Yes. She's fine. Everyone's fine," he tries to assure, but his words don't. If anything, my concern grows. His tone is too light, forced. For the first time, I wonder why he didn't come to see me in the Capitol, after. I wonder why I didn't go see him. I wonder if the only reason he's here now is because he's talked to Prim. It's been weeks since she left.

He follows me into the house, where I'm putting the final touches on a meager meal. I'm getting to the point where I can manage not to burn rice. As Gale leans against the back of a chair, I bustle, digging through unfamiliar cupboards for an extra plate.

We small talk. He tells me he's bought the family a house right outside District 2. Not too close to the Capitol, I think. But not too far, either.

"Posey decorated her room herself. It's very…pink." We laugh, and I remember his little sister commenting on Olivia's pretty green skin. Perhaps she'll make a great stylist herself someday. A real one.

As we eat, we talk about each member of his family, how they're adjusting to life outside the Seam. It takes a good half hour to cover everyone. As we talk, a spark lights in my belly. Gale is free now—unencumbered by his family.

"And you?" I fight to keep my voice neutral. From the way Gale palms his neck, I know I wasn't successful. He knows me too well.

"I've been offered a position." He looks up, tentative. "In District 2. They saw my work with Beetee." Of course. Right near the new house he's bought for his family.

"Oh." I should congratulate him, I suppose, but I can't. A fancy position far from home. I can't picture Gale conforming to what remains of Capitol culture. I can't picture Gale indoors, working over monitors.

I can, however, picture Gale blowing things up. Designing experimental new weapons, snares on a greater magnitude than sticks and stones. There's a reason his traps catch twice as many unsuspecting prey as mine.

He watches my face intently. Waiting for me to say something. Anything. He said he'd been offered a position. The phrasing seems important.

"Are you going to accept?"

Instead of answering, he moves to stand at the window by the sink. The one framing the forest a stone's-throw from the house. He places his now-empty plate down with a plink.

"You know," he says, almost idly, "they have the most excellent forests in District 2."

I know what he's asking. I know exactly what he's asking.

"This is our home," I answer. He doesn't miss the our.

Gale turns back to me now, desperation in his eyes. "It doesn't have to be." His face is hope.

But I'm shaking my head. I have to be here. It's the only place that feels right. I couldn't explain it to Prim, and I can't explain it to him.

"Then run away with me, Catnip," he says. A final plea.

And I consider it.

With the Capitol crumbled, our families no longer rely on us for survival. We could crawl under the remains of the fence—knock it over, even. Leave the ruins of District 12. Walk out into the forest—our forest—and never come back. Tag team hunt and gather, take shelter in the skeletons of former cabins by lakes, count stars by night.

But his words are hollow, only a faded echo of my own to him so long ago.

I look down at Gale's fancy clothes and his fancy shoes and his fancy bow slung over his chair and can't see home in these things. We could survive, out there in the wild, but I'm not sure we'd survive each other. We're not the same barefoot hunters dodging trees and tossing berries.

War has torn us asunder.

Gale watches my face and, as always, he knows.

We say nothing.

Even non-moving, he deflates. We finish our meal, our last supper. We make final small talk, words that diminish and slow like sand draining from a sieve. It's time for him to leave, nothing left for him here, and he steps forward. My heart doesn't even quicken in anticipation of a final kiss from those warm lips.

At the last second, he kisses my forehead instead, a benediction for a child.

I'll miss him something fierce. When I'm imperfectly setting one of his traps. Or have a ripe berry in my hand, no open mouth a target.

The liquid of his eyes says he'll miss me, too.

But obviously not enough.


	4. Chapter 4

And so, I breathe. Go through the motions of life and hope they might start to mean something again. Living with Haymitch is like living alone. He said he'd visit, but his promises are quickly forgotten in the depths of his bottles.

Alone like this, with Prim and Gale and even Mother gone, with District 12 alive with nothing but ghosts, nothing to keep my nightmares at bay, I dream of the faces of those killed by my hand, the faces of those long gone. I awake huddled on the floor, wrenching at my door, staggering down the hall, never in my bed. Always trying to escape.

Always unable.

But then something changes.

Maybe this is the something I'd been waiting for after all.

Three nights after Gale departs, I double-take out my living room window at lights dancing in the former Mellark residence, no doubt from a small fire in the hearth. I linger, wondering if some squatter has decided to live large in a Victor's house. In Peeta's house. The thought angers me, makes me wish for the first time I had my bow within reach.

A few rummagings in closets later, I do. One of my old bows, whittled by my father's hand, made of only coarse materials available then in District 12. It feels more natural in my palm than an arsenal of high-tech Capitol weapons.

Only when I'm clutching the weapon do I realize how loathe I am to use it. How loathe I am to point it at another human being. Even if that person is desecrating Peeta's home.

I decide to consult Haymitch.

It's late, but that doesn't mean much. He's as likely to be awake now as ever.

"What?" he barks when he picks up his phone. On the tenth ring. Not comatose, then. Not yet. Which might explain the irritation.

I ask him about the lights at Peeta's place.

He's outraged. "You called me about some lights?"

I'm impatient. "Do I need to go and encourage the person to move along?"

"If you want. It's Peeta."

My stomach drops out.

Peeta.

Peeta's here.

Haymitch says something about the doctors finally releasing him, he's as cured as he's gonna get, and he's stopped by to say hello already. Three days ago.

Then he hangs up.

Questions cluster around my brain like vultures. How did Peeta arrive without me noticing? Why did he stop by to see Haymitch first? Why hasn't he said hello to me?

There are any number of reasons: He hates me. He doesn't want to see me. He doesn't remember me.

Why did he come back?

That's the only question I think I can answer. He came back for the same reason I did. To put maximum distance (11 other Districts) between himself and the Capitol. To come home. Perhaps his doctors suggested familiar surroundings to speed his continued recovery.

He hasn't said hello to me for a reason. Whatever that reason is, I will respect it. And I won't say hello to him, either.

I'm too afraid it won't be my Peeta who says hello back.

Ø

Days pass, and I don't see Peeta.

But I see where he's been. I see his boot prints in the soot that blankets the town square, trace his pilgrimage to each of our old haunts, to the site of his family's bakery, where only the brick skeleton of the ovens remain, to our school, and even to the shack in the Seam where I had lived. The last gives me pause, as I don't recall ever seeing him on this side of town. I'm surprised he knows where I lived once. I'm surprised he can find it now.

I don't know why he came.

Where he's been, I see freshly dug mounds of dark earth.

There are too many for him to bury alone.

Yet still he tries.

Ø

I dream that night of Prim, somewhere on the front lines of a battle. There's danger, but she doesn't seem to see it, waddling around like a little duck, bobbing to and fro. I'm there, too, but I can't reach her, can't save her. Not this time.

I can't move, can't speak. I can only watch as she burns right up, a human torch. She's still smiling at me as she dies. They bury what's left of her, crumbling bits of ash.

When I wake, there are tears on my face. My throat is raw.

A dream, I tell myself. It was just a dream.

Yet the noise continues—the shallow ring of earth against a shovel. Somewhere close. In my yard or nearby. I peek out my window, but I can't see anything from this angle. Definitely close, right below my room.

It's too early for Haymitch. And manual labor isn't quite his style.

Throwing on my robe, I head downstairs and open the side door to see that someone is indeed digging a grave. Someone so wasted, shrunken somehow, I almost don't recognize him. But it's him. I know it by the color of his hair, darker now than when we were children. I know it by the strength of his jaw. And I know it by how he's coaxing the earth as gently as if herding downy goslings.

After moments that seem like lifetimes, he catches my silhouette in the doorway, and this is the moment. The moment where I see Peeta's eyes—or I don't.

He straightens, wipes an arm across his brow, muscles playing under raw skin, and looks up.

And I see.

Eyes the color of sky after storm. Clear, pure, and drinking me in. Those eyes look at me for a long, long time, all of me.

"How's Gale?" he asks, as though he's asking about the weather. His eyes are weary and wary, but they're his eyes. They're still open and kind. They're still giving me a way out.

I think I know now why Peeta didn't stop by to say hello when he arrived. Looks like he and Gale must have come in on the same train. What must Peeta have thought, to see Gale also returning to District 12? And why hadn't Gale mentioned it? Perhaps he hadn't known.

"Gale's gone," is all I can choke out.

"Ah," he says, turning back to the earth. I stand watching as he finishes supplanting the last in a series of small bushes that are now lining the side of my house. Then he stands back and admires his handiwork, leaning on his shovel.

He doesn't explain why he's gardening on this fine morning, and I don't ask. Perhaps he just needed an excuse to approach me. Perhaps, like me, he needed something with which to occupy his hands.

Now that he's here, now that I've seen him, I don't want him to leave.

"Would you like some breakfast?" I ask.

He turns to ponder me for a moment, eyes distant.

Then he smiles.

Ø

Our lives flow together, weak trickles uniting to a steady stream.

The days go thus: I destroy, he creates; I hunt, he bakes. We consume. We bury our dead. We make plans to rebuild, pacing off the town square and throwing out ideas for this and that.

After a simple supper of my meat and his bread, we watch the monitor. Most of Plutarch's new programming is too still upbeat, too bright, tooCapitol for us to truly appreciate, but we do religiously watch the news segment. We've stepped back from the world, yes, but we know too readily how quickly apathy can slip into atrocity.

We watch as President Coin's administration stumbles to its feet, less the newborn colt that she would wish and more the awakening of a drunkard. We watch as she advocates a final Hunger Games using children from the Capitol, including one granddaughter of the ex-President Snow. We look at each other, horrified, death in our eyes. Three phone calls later, we learn we're not the only ones who vehemently oppose this idea. We're not the only ones sickened by death, by retaliation, by District 13's callous disregard for life.

We also learn that the Mockingjay's call is still answered.

Tune in next week, and we see Alma Coin impeached from office. My hand finds Peeta's, the first time our skin has touched since he's come home. We watch as Coin is dragged from behind her desk by her own soldiers, ice-gray hair wild, askew.

That night, we're giddy. We're smiling and we're laughing and we're celebrating. I haven't seen Peeta smile this much since…ever.

He's humming to himself in the kitchen, whipping up something. "It's a surprise," he says, shooing me out. So I head down to the cellar and carve a hunk out of the hindquarters of the latest buck I'd brought down. With newfound time and freedom, I can devote myself to bigger game. I'd stalked this one for three days in the forest and finally slid it home using a makeshift sled fashioned from tree branches. Gale would have been proud.

In half an hour, Peeta pokes his head into the dining room to see what I'm up to. His hair is tousled and damp from heat, and there's a streak of flour on his cheek. When he spies the venison splayed on the table, his nose crinkles, though his eyes twinkle.

"What, no squirrel?" It's a rhetorical question, as he knows I haven't been killing vermin recently. Peeta's got a soft spot for squirrel. Fond memories from childhood, and all that.

I toss a chunk of gristle at him. It splats against the wall at least a foot away from where Peeta is smirking at me. He doesn't even blink.

"Best stick to arrows," he says, then ducks back into the kitchen before I can launch my next missile.

I call after him, "And you'd best stick to the kitchen." The oven creaks, and a delightful smell wafts my way. I know this smell. "Wouldn't want your so-called special surprise to burn."

I expect some witty retort of the ilk we've been trading all night. Something about how, as a chef extraordinaire, his cuisine can't possibly burn. It would just as soon hop out of the oven on its own before it dared.

But silence is my only answer. And the silence does not smile. A beat later, metal clatters to the floor, magnified and loud against the tile. From somewhere, Buttercup yowls. I expect to hear Peeta's laughter, as he assures me that everything's okay, he just tripped over the cat. It's Buttercup's favorite game, darting about underfoot when you least expect him.

But still I hear nothing.

It's too quiet.

The wrong kind of quiet.

I surge up from the dining table and round into the kitchen. Peeta is nowhere to be seen. The oven is gaping wide, heat pouring from its maw. A bake pan is upended nearby, buns spilled on the floor. Stepping gingerly around them, I find Peeta crouched against the kitchen island, as if hiding from something. Or someone.

"Peeta?" There's still a hint of a laugh in my voice, but it fades when he flinches at the sound, eyes screwed closed. His skin is pale and clammy, a far cry from the ruddy face that had been teasing me but a minute earlier. He's still wearing a pink, frilly oven mitt. My hands skim the air above his broad shoulders, bunched and hunched, uncertain what's wrong. "Did you burn yourself?"

His eyes wrench open at that, cold and wild. And then the oven mitt is warm over my mouth and nose, and Peeta's forearm is against my throat. He slams me, hard, into a nearby cabinet. Wood cuts into my lower back.

There's still flour on his cheek.

I can't say any words, can hardly breathe. I mouth his name against his hand (a muffled ee-a), but he can't hear. He can't hear anything at all. He's intent, laser-focused on his arm pressing into my neck.

This is serious. Dead serious.

Instinct kicks in, and I go feral, lunging and scratching at any body part in reach. Peeta grunts and slaps away my increasingly feeble attempts. He's not as strong as he once was, but he's still a lot stronger than I am. So strong that I can't breathe.

Panic. I think of my knife from earlier. But it's useless, sitting too far away on the table where I'd left it. And there's nothing else nearby, nothing within reach on these impeccable cabinets. Through long-standing habit, Peeta keeps a spotless kitchen.

Peeta, I try again, but there's no sound, there's no breath. My eyes are heavy, I can't keep them open. The world is spinning, my vision swimming with darkness.

Peeta's killing me.

I slump, my head lolling to the side.

And I fall. Down, down, until the ground is all that's holding me up. The pressure is gone, and I'm sucking in air. I look up to see Peeta still right there, crouched low, arms outstretched as if to restrain me still. But he's not touching me now. He let me go. He let me fall.

For a beat, we stare at each other.

There's blood on his face and his shirt. And probably on my face, my clothes now, too. It's just the blood that had been on my hands, from the deer, but Peeta focuses on it in horror, eyes still tinged in madness.

"Peeta," I try to say, but I can only cough, low and hoarse. My throat and lungs burn.

Wordless, he shoves away from me, explodes out the kitchen door, leaving it ajar, and stumbles into the night. I want to follow, but I'm still dizzy, still gasping for breath. My legs won't hold my weight when I try.

In his wake, he leaves several cheese buns, trampled on the floor.

Ø

I don't even try to sleep, too worried about Peeta and where he's gone. Not into the forest, please, oh please. So many ways that he can hurt himself there. I agonize about whether I should try to go after him now, despite the darkness.

Instead, I sit on the couch until dawn, and I trust. Trust that he won't do it. Trust that he can't do it.

Our next move…is to kill me.

He'd said that to me, once. And he'd meant it.

I sit and I rock and I wait, until the sky has warmed enough to show me the way he's gone. Then I follow the signs of his passing, all the way to the house across from mine. Thankfully, he didn't go far. He didn't need to go far. He just needed to get away from me.

Haymitch answers before I can knock.

"He's here," he gruffs. "Sleeping."

I ignore his grimace at my appearance. "You can't let him hurt himself. You can't." It's a fact. It's not even the slightest bit a request.

Haymitch just nods. We understand each other.

I nod, not trusting my voice further, then turn away.

"Katniss," he calls after me. "I'll take care of him."

It's a promise. But we both know it's a shaky one at best. Shaky because this is Haymitch. Shaky because this is Peeta. The doctors said that Peeta was as healed as he was going to get.

I guess this is what they meant.


	5. Chapter 5

My axe slices through the air. Yes, axe. Johanna would be proud. With a hollow thump, the head buries in a stubborn fence post, several inches above my previous attempt. Now Johanna would be laughing at me.

Yank it out and try again.

At this rate, it will take me years to tear down the remaining lengths of fence. It still stands in places, where so many other things in District 12 don't.

I need help—Peeta's help—but here's the problem. Peeta won't come near me with an axe. He won't come near me, period.

It's been a little over a month. One month in which I can barely sleep and can hardly eat and am to the point where I'm about to kick Buttercup if he so much as shows a single tooth. During said month, Peeta has spent his days with Haymitch, as he used to spend them with me, slinking back only at night, awash in a perfume of liquor, sleeping it off on a pallet downstairs.

I miss him fiercely.

The few times we've talked, Haymitch says to just give it time. Yeah, 'cause that worked so well for him. He's had loads of time and not a lot to show for it.

Yank out the axe and try again.

My anger grows with each misdirected swing, until finally I discard the axe entirely and use my hands and my feet, pounding the wood with everything I have until even that isn't enough. Spent, I lean against the post, everything aching, within and without, and gasp. I can't quite cry.

I'm losing Peeta. Losing him just like I lost Father and Prim and Gale.

Any day now, I expect he won't come back to me at all. He and Haymitch can just shack up, drink up, and tend to geese. Two broken souls, the spoils of war.

I can't let this happen.

I can't lose, Peeta, too. Not after everything.

Staring down at the axe, I think: What would Joanna do? The thought makes me sob-laugh. For one, she'd already have chopped down this goddom fence. With her teeth, if necessary.

Time to channel a bit of Joanna's genius. Or madness, depending on who you ask. With a fierce smile, I sling the axe over one shoulder and stride back toward the village.

Ø

Thump, goes the axe, right in the middle of Haymitch's front door. It makes for a satisfying knock, the only warning they get. My plan is to march in, find Peeta, and have it out. He's so good with his words, he's going to use them. Now.

But when I push into the house, I draw up in shock.

The interior looks just like my house. Which yeah, is because our houses are mirror images of each other. But you'd never know it from the way Haymitch decorates, usually with trash and underwear and feathers and the occasional puke stain only half-heartedly scrubbed. I don't remember ever seeing his floor before. Right now, it looks cleaner than mine.

In fact, as I stalk through room after room on the first floor, kitchen to living to dining, I find that my initial impression was right. His house iscleaner than mine. Everything is neat and tidy and geese-free. And where are all the bottles?

Everywhere I look, I can see Peeta. And not the Peeta I expected to see, out of his mind and drooling on the floor. He's clearly not just sitting over here drinking, as I suspected. At least, not all the time.

"That you, sweetheart?" Haymitch drawls, as though I'm right on cue. Like I come busting in here regularly. His voice carries from somewhere below, through the open door to the cellar.

That's more like it. Perhaps he and Peeta have come to an agreement—debauchery in the downstairs only. This is perfect. Nowhere for Peeta to hide. He's trapped.

The thought must occur to him as well, for I hear a bit of a scuffle from below, boots on the stairs. "No you don't," Haymitch says, and I hurry toward the sound.

As I descend the steps, I'm assaulted by the smell. Noxious and chemical.

My mood shifts back to black as I descend into the man cave. Definitely liquor here, and lots of it, from the smell. Bottles of all sorts line every available surface, across the shelves and arrayed on several tables to boot. Looks like Haymitch has been stockpiling for a small army. And there's a machine of some sort in the corner, a homemade contraption of glass and tubes and liquid. I'm pretty sure it's a still, like the very illegal one they used to have down at the Hob, which I'd only ever glimpsed by accident, usually when I was unloading my wares in the back room. Looking more closely, I see that it might even be the same one. Leave it to Haymitch to have somehow sequestered it before the Hob was razed.

I see Peeta now, arranged loosely on a low couch, his face flushed, whether from drink or something else, I can't tell. The neck of his shirt is rumpled, as though Haymitch had recently been yanking him around by it. Haymitch himself leans against a support column nearby, somewhat out of the line of fire but close enough. He's still vertical, so that's something.

Both of them are looking at me.

Haymitch is grinning lazily.

Peeta is not. He looks drawn, nervous, not quite looking at my face.

Too bad.

"What is this?" I demand, waving a hand at the…paraphernalia.

"I'm glad you asked," Haymitch responds. "Peeta here is helping me with my very own en-ter-prise." I'm amused at the thought of Haymitch considering whatever this is an enterprise. Still, it sounds better than the alternative, which is that they've been lying around, incoherent. Which is usually what I imagine Haymitch doing over here.

Looking more closely, I see that some of the bottles are actually jars and that they're not all filled with a clear liquid. Some of them contain strange shapes and colors, difficult to decipher in the gloom. And the smell…a tinge of vinegar. Mother uses it to preserve some of her more rare herbs.

I direct my attention back to Peeta. "We need to talk."

Peeta's face goes dark. "There's nothing to say," he mutters. "It won't happen again." Because I'm staying away from you, his tone implies. His diction is clear.

"Nothing happened, Peeta."

He looks up, incredulous. "Is that what you're telling yourself? You consider that nothing? I could have killed you."

"But you didn't. Not with a gun, not with your hands. You won't hurt me."

"Tell that to your bruises," Peeta scoffs. I'd forgotten the fingerprints that haven't yet faded from my neck. The simple shirt I'm wearing does nothing to hide them.

Haymitch is following the exchange with rapt attention. I suspect this is the most action he's had in months.

"You won't hurt me," I repeat, more emphatically now. "And I'm here to prove it."

Glance over and I see that Haymitch approves. Good. I want him here for what I'm about to do. He doesn't shift from his post, clearly understanding his role. Damage control.

I ignore Peeta's clear distress, stark on his face and in every line of his body. Instead, I stare at him, right at him, and I say a single word.

"Burn." The same word I'd used twice in the kitchen earlier, innocently. The same code word Snow had programmed as a trigger. The word that makes him want to kill me.

His eyes go wide and the blood vacates his face. "Katniss," he hisses. Haymitch looks alive, arms lowering to his sides, swinging free.

"Burn," I say again, louder now, taking a step toward Peeta.

He twitches and then begins to slowly unfold himself from the couch, standing stiffly. Like a cobra preparing to strike. Haymitch takes a step forward. He can be between us in an instant. He's not smiling anymore.

"Burn."

Peeta closes his eyes, fists clenched. Muscles bunch in his jaw.

"Burn!" I'm screaming it now, stepping forward to invade the crap out of Peeta's personal bubble. Daring, taunting him to hurt me. "Burn burn burn!" I'm channeling the heck out of Johanna. I probably look crazy, hands and hair wild, flagrantly goading the beast.

Peeta's eyes fly open.

For one second, one unbearable second, I think he's actually going to do it.

Then he says something, a single word of his own.

"No." His voice is shaky and his hands are still clenched but his eyes are clear. They haven't been swallowed hole. He reaches out to still my hands, holding them close to his chest.

We stare at each other, both fighting for breath. I'm still seeing red, teetering on the knife's edge between furious and confused. But Peeta, Peeta looks euphoric. Not a smile, really, but his expression is lit from within.

I don't understand. We haven't spoken for weeks, and the first thing he says to me is…

He frowns and looks down. "What happened to your hands?" He's peering at my abused and swollen knuckles, the ones I'd tried to treat like hammers against that stupid fence.

I ignore him because really?

"Did you just tell me 'no'?"

"That he did," Haymitch interjects smoothly, effectively popping our little bubble by pushing through us, making us both take a staggering step back. He grabs a nearby bottle and totters toward the stairs. "And on that note, I'll be up here if you kids need me."

Then he's gone, and we're alone.

Haymitch just left me alone with Peeta.

We stare at each other.

Stare and stare.

What just happened.

"No," Peeta repeats, clearly. "No, I will not…b-burn." He hesitates around the word, as if it's difficult to articulate. "And neither will you."

I have no words.

We stare some more.

"It took three weeks," he begins. "Three weeks before Haymitch could say that word without me trying to bash his face in."

And that's when he tells me about what he's been doing for the past month, about his little arrangement with Haymitch, forged the night he'd almost choked me to death in our kitchen. Haymitch would help curb Peeta's instinctive reaction to the code word that has been branded into his brain. In return, Peeta would help Haymitch fix the old still.

"I have a lot of experience with kitchen equipment," Peeta says, as if by way of apology. Guess that extends to persnickety stills. "Oh, and I've also been canning some of the vegetables that Haymitch has been growing in his garden."

Haymitch has a garden. Haymitch has been growing vegetables.

What is this.

What is Peeta saying.

He's saying that Haymitch has a garden and has been growing vegetables. Oh, and that Haymitch has been fermenting those vegetables to develop a new strain of beverage. Together, they've retrofitted the old still (using a couple of choice new components from New Capitol, of course), to enable the revolutionary process. All the benefits of alcohol with none of the side effects. It's called Vegetate, and it's all the rage across the Districts.

Vegetate. It's what I'd smelled on him for so many nights, assuming the worst. I can smell it now, a bit more sweet, more earthy than Haymitch's usual poison.

Peeta had heard about it during the months he spent recuperating in the Capitol. The substance was proving successful in treating an addiction to alcohol. Several of his fellow patients in the hospital had suffered from the affliction.

This story that he's telling me seems impossible. It seems improbable. It seems like the greatest story I've ever heard.

Apparently, as the old regime continues to crumble, all sorts of state secrets are coming to light. So many tactics that President Snow had employed over the years to keep the Districts mired in a devastating blend of hope and despair. For example, he had purposefully impeded the progress of safer drugs and stimulants in favor of the more addictive morphling, white liquor, and the joysticks. The better to control us.

I feel sick.

Peeta sees the shift in my face and helps me sit, keeping me close on the couch. He knows about my Father. For my Father, it had been a match.

"I'm glad Snow's dead," I say, fierce.

Peeta's own eyes go hard. "Yes," he agrees, gathering my hands again. A habit, I suppose, a little act that we had performed many a time for the cameras. "But I'm also glad you didn't kill him."

I wonder where Peeta was, the day I didn't kill Snow.

"So," he continues, his knee now pressing against my own, "I've been helping Haymitch wean himself off the hard stuff. In return, Haymitch has been helping me wean off my own little problem."

His little problem, he says.

"The fact that you still want to kill me."

"Exactly."

"How?" I'm curious. How did Haymitch succeed where a battery of Capitol doctors could not?

"Haymitch used some…unorthodox methods. After I told him what happened, he started saying…that word to me several times a day. Startling me with it, when I was most vulnerable, when I least expected it. Even screaming it at me. The first several times, we really went at it." His gaze goes hazy, remembering. I can easily see the two of them wrestling to the floor, Peeta putting Haymitch in a choke hold. "It was almost unbearable. The impulse to find you, to…" He looks at me again, wets his lips, then looks away.

"Then why…" I begin, but I can't finish. There are so many ways to finish that question. Why did Peeta come back to District 12 in the first place, if there was even a remote possibility that he could hurt me? And then, after his nightmares came true, why did he stay?

He reads between the lines. "You know why, Katniss." The way he says my name, low and almost desperate, sends a tingle up my spine. His thumbs are feather-soft against my skin. He's never used this tone for the cameras.

And I do know why. I know exactly why Peeta does the things that he does, when it comes to me. I've always known. For him, what we'd done for the cameras was never completely an act. Maybe that's why our adoring public always liked him better. The real Peeta shone through in a way that the real Katniss could not.

Peeta half-laughs, a puff of air through his nose. "Haymitch," he says more loudly, directing his voice up the stairs, "has been tossing hints that I'm ready for a trial by fire. But I wasn't so sure. We'd been taking bets as to how soon you'd be beating down his door. He won the bet." Literally.

We regard each other for a moment. My hands itch to reach out and touch his face. I always want to reach out and touch his face.

"You can come home now," I say, and it's not really a request.

Peeta just smiles a wonderful, wonderful smile.

"Hey Mockingjay," Haymitch calls from above. He sounds close, as though perhaps he hadn't gone as far as he'd led us to believe. "Why is there an axe in my door?"

Ø

Peeta does indeed come home, with a promise to Haymitch that they'll still continue their little side business. Apparently, they're making quite the profit. As if that matters here, with nothing yet to buy.

When Peeta does come home, he's still tentative, choosing to continue sleeping down by the hearth until we're absolutely sure that there's no other trigger that will have him at my throat. He's weakest at night, he says. But at least he's here.

It's not quite the same, not the easy camaraderie that we shared before. Peeta continues to hold back, not fully trusting himself yet. Maybe he never will.

Before bed, by the light of a flickering fire, we play "Real or Not Real," reinforcing true memories, expunging shiny ones. Sometimes I practice saying the word burn, and he practices not hurting me. It's the ultimate button I can push, when I'm impatient and on edge and I just want to get a rise out of him, to hurt him. But he never hurts me in return. Oh, he sometimes hurts other things around me, in his weaker moments (an elbow through the wall here, a cracked lamp there), but he doesn't hurt me.

Never again me.

Ø

We're close now.

I can feel it.

But we're still waiting.


	6. Chapter 6

I awake to a tortured, almost inhuman cry.

Mutt, memory warns, and I'm crouched by my bed, bow in hand, listening furiously to the night. The sound comes again, and it's no mutt. It's my name, yes. But it's on Peeta's lips.

As I often do, I creep down the stairs. To watch, to wait. Sometimes, my presence is enough. This time, it's not.

"Katniss!" He's on his haunches, twisting himself in his sheets, reaching blindly. Reaching, but not finding.

I hunter-step closer, silently, unsure as always if I should wake him. He's cautioned me against coming too close when he dreams, when his grip on reality is tenuous at best. His eyes are open, staring, mouth working, arms flailing. His fists would bruise, and then who knows what he might do. Bunk up with Haymitch for another month.

"Peeta," I whisper, my hands raised as if to soothe. But as always, I don't touch.

He doesn't hear. He can't.

He's crying my name, breath labored.

"Peeta," I say again, louder.

His breath is too labored. More labored than I've ever heard it. Something's very wrong. With a gurgling gasp, he slumps forward, too hard, too fast. I catch him before he hits the ground, cushioning his fall with my own, grunting under his weight.

"Peeta! Peeta!"

But I'm calling to nothing.

Roll him over with effort. Bring my ear down close to his mouth, my good ear. He's not breathing. Check his pulse.

It's not beating.

His heart has stopped.

I'm clawing at his hands, slapping his face,

"No," I sob. "I won't let you leave me. Not again."

I think of Haymitch, of the phone on the wall that separates us. I think of Prim, of Mother, too far away to help me now. And when I think of them, I think of Finnick. He taught me many things. He may have taught me the greatest thing of all.

So I move like Finnick. Pinch Peeta's nose closed. Press my lips to his. Blow and blow. Then pump the chest, above his heart, above his lungs.

Then repeat.

Again.

And again.

I'm sobbing, crying his name, begging him to breathe.

Begging him to stay with me.

Stay.

Stay.

Stay.

"Always," he whispers between lips cracked and coughing, fighting for life.

His lungs, they breathe.

His heart, it beats.

Now that I've touched his lips, it's like I can't stop. This is not us in a cave, grateful to be alive, scared that this might be our last night on Earth. This is us in a home, our home, and I'm grateful that he's alive.

With the tips of my fingers, I explore his face—his lips, his nose, his eyelids. I swirl patterns on him everywhere, reassuring myself that he's okay, that this is real. Slowly, he comes alive under my care. I help him sit up, touching him all the while, fingers down his arms and across his palms.

He remains still, just breathing. Letting me feel him, leaning into my touch, eyes closed. He's still so very pale.

For the first time in a long time, he doesn't object when I lead him upstairs and pull him to my bed. He doesn't object as I wrap myself up in him.

"What happened?" I ask from where I've nestled myself in his arms, right where I'm supposed to be, my good ear listening to the warm lub-dub of his heart.

"The doctors warned me my heart isn't what it once was. I have medicine, but I can't take it when I dream like that." My gut clenches once. He hadn't told me. I almost lost him.

"What did you dream?"

"Of you. Dead. The only thing that can stop my heart is you."

I can't resist. "And force fields."

"And a host of other things," he agrees. "But you're the only one who can bring me to life again."

"Me and Finnick." His heartbeat and his breath have made me giddy, thoughtless. And I'm laughing and laughing and then I'm not laughing anymore because I'm crying because Peeta almost died (again), right here in front of me, and because Finnick. Finnick had.

His turn to hold me, and I'm not the only one weeping.

Then we sleep and—for the first night in a long while—we don't dream.

Ø

Later, after Peeta's better and I've allowed him out of bed at last, he putters in and around the house, tending to the primroses, which have opened to behold the world. He brings me a bud and tickles my nose with it, then reaches to nestle it in my hair, where the braid begins. As he withdraws, his fingers linger on my neck, a beat too long.

My breath catches.

Peeta's always been tactile, I remember that, but not like this. His hand on my shoulder as he leans in to see what I'm doing. His thigh nestling my feet as we sit to watch the nightly broadcasts, closer than before. His fingers brushing the inside of my wrist in the kitchen, just because.

This thing that he's doing, these seemingly innocent touches that are anything but, it's like he's drawing me tight, micron by micron. And when he comes to bed—my bed now—he shucks his shirt. So when he gathers me to him so that we can drift to sleep (so careful, so chaste), all I can think about is skin. It's maddening.

I can't sleep, this time for a new reason. That reason is lying next to me, warm and solid and snoring softly. Snoring, when I'm sitting here frustrated and wide awake and so incredibly warm, sheets clinging to my restless legs.

He's waiting for me, Peeta is, the way that he waited the day with the gun, like the three days he lay in the mud, the three days he gave me after Gale. The way he's waited for me all our lives.

Waiting for me to reach out and take him.

"Peeta," I say into the void.

His breath catches but then resumes.

"Peeta," I say louder, and I can tell that I've woken him because his breath evens and he shifts to his side, facing me.

"Sorry," he sighs, voice rough from sleep. He thinks I'm saying his name because of the snoring, as I sometimes do, when he's keeping me awake.

"No, I…" I start. Darkness swallows the rest. The night is very quiet, very still. Quiet for minutes or hours, I can't be sure. Quiet for so long that Peeta has probably slipped back to sleep. Yet I can tell somehow from the timbre of the silence and the cadence of his breathing that he's still here, still waiting. Patient as always.

"Katniss…?" he says at last, and that's what does it, my name on his lips.

I melt forward, crossing the sliver of cool sheet that separates us and hover above him for a moment, propped on my elbows, peering into a face that's too dark to see. Already his arms open, ready for me, reaching for me, as if he somehow knew what I was going to do before I did.

My fingers find his face, tracing his features. His hand curls against the skin of my lower back, careful and soothing. We stay that way for a bit, just stroking and swirling, balancing on the edge.

Then he says, softer still, "Please."

He's waited long enough.

I lower my mouth to his, following the trace of my finger along his lower lip. We've kissed before, but this feels like a first. This time, we go soft and unbearably slow, taking our time, learning the shape and the feel and the taste of each other, tucked away and safe in the deep dark. This isn't us kissing for the cameras or frantic from the shock of being alive. This is us kissing for us. Together, we spark a new type of fire.

"Teach me to bring you to life," Peeta whispers against my mouth.

And I do. We practice bringing each other to life.

This, this is what we were waiting for.

And it's good.


	7. Chapter 7

Slowly, other refugees from District 12 find their way home, lost lambs to the fold. Names, faces I never thought I'd see again. Greasy Sae, Thom. Peeta and I, we realize we've been rebuilding for them. For the survivors. For their children.

Peeta bakes bread to feed first tens, then hundreds. Standing before windows wide, he sketches a new, sprawling town, purposefully drawing outside once restrictive lines. With chalk, he resurrects a town hall without a whipping post, a bakery to feed anyone, a market. Plans for a school where children will be taught the right lessons.

As one, the townspeople help craft his visions into reality. Even Haymitch helps, standing tall and proud, no longer in the grip of his former demons. Slowly, District 12 is reborn, rising from its ashes.

When life begins anew, when chimneys spew and babies wail and the surrounding earth sprouts green, we can no longer call this place, this home, by a number. I want to call it Sorrow, for that's how I feel. But Peeta wants Seed. The genesis of new life.

At the christening ceremony, the townspeople unanimously vote for the future rather than the past. For the first time, they don't follow the Girl on Fire. There is merriment on the streets of Seed.

"You and your tongue," I chide Peeta later. "You were always the persuasive one."

"And you were always the one," he says back, serious. Then, not so much. "Also, don't pretend that you don't love my tongue."

Even now, he makes me blush.

Years pass, and even Prim comes back, now a woman, holding hands with a fellow Healer from District 4. District 12 has not been the same without a Healer Everdeen.

I'm unable to have children. Prim's not sure, but she guesses that it was the tracker jacker venom. Me, him, both, we don't know. Peeta quietly mourns, but I understand.

This world is not a place for children.

Not yet.

When Prim announces that she's expecting, our attention shifts from my private burden to her joyous one. When he arrives, her tow-headed boy looks like just the type to throw burnt bread to a starving girl.

Of course, in this world—the world we've made—we'll never know if he would.

fin


End file.
